Writing From The Margins: The Edna O'Brien Case

Edna O'Brien died recently. I have read only one or two of her short stories, but have read several interviews and listened to a few others. She captivates me. She is even inspirational - besides sounding like a hoot.

When I was younger, thinking of being a writer, I gave up for several reasons. One was that I lived in Indiana and had nothing to say. Looking back, I can safely say I was a blind moron with a streak of yellow.

It does not matter where you are from, there are people and there are stories. One needs only to work at telling them. It is doing the work - putting the words down on paper to create characters acting out humanity - that matters.

I think Edna O'Brien proves this. Please keep reading.

My encounter with Edna O’Brien, the great literary crusader and giant of Irish literature

The novelist, who has died aged 93, was a huge figure, stylistically brilliant and forever ambitious, whether she was writing about motherhood (1964’s Girls in Their Married Bliss, a sequel to The Country Girls), war criminals (2015’s The Little Red Chairs), or the fate of schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram (2019’s Girl). She was prolific, producing movie scripts and plays as well as novels, short stories and poetry, in a career that spanned six decades. A siren voice for Ireland who broke barriers, O’Brien sustained her status as a thrilling, boundary-pushing writer throughout her long career. In a sign of her enduring significance, the National Library of Ireland bought all of her papers in 2021 so that her archive could be preserved; it holds 50 boxes of letters, notes and drafts.

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That same year, fans of O’Brien devoured a memoir that featured sublime prose as well as gossipy tidbits about life during the “Swinging Sixties”. In Country Girl, O’Brien laid it all out. She was born in rural Co Clare in 1930. Her father was an alcoholic and terrible with money: financial ruin, and the disgrace that would accompany it, loomed throughout her childhood. She saw writing as a vocation and wrote stories from the age of eight or nine: “I would go out to the fields to write. The words ran away with me,” she recalled. When the time came for her to leave home, she escaped to Dublin, and became an apprentice chemist at a pharmacy while simultaneously looking for opportunities to write. She got a gig writing a weekly column, or “nonsensical jottings” as she later called them, for the railway company magazine under a pen name (“Sabiola” after an Egyptian concubine). Slowly she began to infiltrate the overwhelmingly male literary scene in Dublin. She met her future husband, the Czech-Irish writer Ernest Gébler, during this time. He was, she said, “handsome beyond words”. He was also older and divorced: divorce would not be legal in Ireland for another 35 years or so, and their relationship was violently opposed by her family.

They married, and emigrated to the “bleak suburbia” of southwest London with their two young sons. There, living in a sort of dreary exile with a husband who turned out to be cruel and controlling, O’Brien wrote The Country Girls in a three-week-long haze of inspiration. It changed her life. At 30, she was a literary star, with the financial means to leave her husband and gain custody of her children (even if it would be a long and painful process).

Banned, burned and reviled: what was so radical about Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls?

The other, probably more significant, reason for the longevity of The Country Girls trilogy is of course that, beyond all the tales and tellings of how the novels came into being and made their progress throughout the world, they are a work of art. Sometimes painful, often funny, O’Brien lifted the linguistic play she so loved in James Joyce and, taking note of his relish in the interchange of the high and low in human nature, she went away and fashioned something wholly her own. These are novels of heartbreaking empathy, rigorous honesty and peerless beauty. So now they stand: humane, true and beautifully true forever, no matter how literary fashions change or how many years go by.

Edna O’Brien: liberator and seductress

Young Irish women were not meant to have sex, only babies, and O’Brien’s novels were denounced by Catholic bishops and priests in Ireland, some even burning copies. It shows just how backward and primitive De Valera’s Ireland was before Ireland joined the European Community in 1973 and had its Enlightenment revolution.

She wrote many other books – mainly fiction, plays, short stories, always with a lilting musical voice. No other writer in no other country of her time did so much to liberate women or explain women to men.

She wasn’t difficult to read. Her prose was tight, to the point, always carrying the story along. Thus the great and good of the Nobel Literature prize committee — who like long words and unreadable novels, plays or poems — could not bring themselves to honour the greatest woman novelist the British Isles produced in modern times.

 Edna O’Brien was the last great Irish iconoclast: Great Irish literature is defined by dissent. So why do so many writers uphold the status quo? by Finn McRedmond 

But it is O’Brien’s iconoclasm that afforded her a deserving place in the Irish canon. The towering figures of Irish literature – Yeats, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, JM Synge, Seán O’Casey – shared a dissident sensibility, dogged questioning of the national story, and a disdain for the established order. Both Synge and O’Casey triggered riots with their plays – neither willing to cow to narratives of noble republican sacrifice; Joyce’s Ulysses was banned for obscenity; Yeats cleaved closer to Oscar Wilde as the commanding heights of the country rejected him. They also all in some form wrote about Ireland from outside of Ireland (O’Brien wrote from London). When Yeats entreats his fellow poets to learn their trade, perhaps this is what he means: subversion has always been the beating heart of the Irish intellectual. In a country long – and still – under the cosh of conventional mindedness, these luminaries burned even brighter.

O’Brien understood this. Her truculence in the face of priggish norms, her belief that women were more than auxiliary servants, her insistence to keep publishing in face of such opprobrium (she joked that The Country Girls looks like a prayer book in comparison to the next two in the trilogy) reminds us of the tradition she inherited.

Of course, disrupting the status quo alone does not afford literary greatness. But O’Brien wrote with clarity and levity, prose that is both sparse and imaginative. The spectre of Hemingway and Fitzgerald is evident. And The Country Girls – with its two young female protagonists, who navigate courtship and adolescence – was not just a “quintessential tale of Irish girlhood” in the 1950s; it was a blueprint for it.

Yesterday, in the Payless grocery parking lot, I saw this pickup truck with a huge banner reading "Make America Godly Again."  I see that and I think of O'Brien's Ireland - among several other items. There is too much in far-right Christianity that equates godliness with suppression of humanity. O'Brien did not have an MFA, she had not lived distanced from what she wrote about. Where are our American writers with the same background writing against the grain? I am too old for the job.

(As for the other items about a godly America - genocide of the Native Americans, slavery, Jim Crow, internment of the Japanese, suppression of women, and our gun culture killing children all came to mind.)

A beacon of brazenness and defiance’: Edna O’Brien remembered by Anne Enright, Colm Tóibín and more

More from The Guardian, Lisa Allardice's Edna O’Brien: her fearlessness paved the way for today’s female Irish writers.

When young women today read Sally Rooney (or Enright or McBride or any of the many acclaimed female Irish writers) and see themselves reflected in their pages, we have to thank in some small part the fearlessness and spirit of that Catholic girl from County Clare so many years earlier. O’Brien took her writing seriously, and so eventually did her country (she was given the 2001 Irish PEN lifetime achievement award), and the literary establishment of which she became such a talismanic part. As O’Brien herself observed, they don’t make writers like her any more, and the books world (and its parties) will be much more dull without her. “I want to go out as someone who kept to the truth,” she said in one of her final interviews. “I can’t bear phoneys. I want integrity.”

Yes, you can be from the boondocks and still be a writer - if you work at your writing. 

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